Illovo Sugar Africa

PRODUCTS

Rapid Incident Reporting

Illovo is Africa’s biggest sugar producer and has extensive agricultural and manufacturing operations in six African countries. The group produces raw and refined sugar for local, regional African, European Union (EU), United States of America (USA) and world markets from sugar cane supplied by its own agricultural operations and independent growers who supply cane to Illovo’s factories. The group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Associated British Foods plc (ABF), a diversified international food, ingredients and retail group operating in 48 countries.

THE CHALLENGE

Illovo produces more than 1.8 million tones of sugar annually, over 6 African countries. The Group health and safety team are tasked with ensuring that their permanent and temporary employees follow the Group HSE procedures and that all incidents are correctly, timeously and accurately reported. This is no easy task when you are dealing with 16 sites in 6 countries. Their Incident reporting needed to be consistent in terminology and degree of severity reported immediately and more importantly, had to be consolidated for both operational and group reporting quickly and accurately.

THE SOLUTION

Rapid Incident was commissioned to ensure that all HSE incidents in the group are reported consistently, using the same terminology and applying the same logic for severity rating, timeously and accurately.

“Previous solutions reviewed were too cost-prohibitive. Rapid Incident offered a flexible, cost-effective solution that could meet our needs.” – Werner Vosloo – Group H&S Manager.

THE RESULTS

Illovo had attempted several other methods to record and report group HSE incidents.  None of these methods proved very effective, in terms of accuracy of reporting and effective time management.  The Group was therefore reticent to commit to another system without ensuring it worked effectively for them. The OVS Solutions team (the Africa licensee of Rapid), were prepared to run a proof of concept on 2 selected Illovo sites to prove the product could work as demonstrated.

“This is another thing that made the Rapid solutions so effective” – Werner Vosloo – Group H&S Manager.

The 2 sites selected to test the product  were “very happy” with the products.  They reported significant increases in accuracy of reporting and were very impressed with the time saved on reporting incidents.  As a result of this, the teams from the 2 test sites were able to convey their experience to the other 14 sites, who agreed to adopt Rapid Incident Reporting.

“Customer support received from OVS Solutions was excellent” – Werner Vosloo – Group H&S Manager.

OVS did an excellent job of communicating system capabilities and how they could meet Illovo’s requirements and ensuring the project implementation was completed on time and as planned.  They were able to understand our business processes, across multiple sites in multiple countries, and make sure the solution met our needs.  They gave training to each site and did so proficiently and confidently